An enormous amount of research, development, and analysis has been carried out with regard to detecting and ameliorating manufacturing defects in manufactured products. These efforts have, in turn, led to the development and improvement of statistical analysis, testing strategies and procedures, and to great improvement in the design and manufacture of devices and products in order to provide cost-effective manufacture with minimum defects and maximum yields. As with any complex analytical and procedural task, the detection and amelioration of manufacturing defects is characterized by many different costs, benefits, and constraints that need to be balanced in order to provide optimal solutions. For example, it is possible, in many cases, to design manufactured articles with many levels of redundant components and automated failure detection, so that component failures can be circumvented by reconfiguring the device or article to use a spare operational component in place of a defective component. However, the design and manufacture of such highly redundant devices may greatly increase the cost of the devices and can lower device performance. When accurate and reliable testing of devices can be carried out, it may be more cost effective to design and manufacture simple, non-redundant-component-containing devices, and to test the devices in order to remove defective devices from the manufacturing output stream. While this strategy may significantly decrease the yield of operational devices, or, in other words, ratio of operational devices to total devices manufactured, the cost in discarding non-operational, defective devices may nonetheless be smaller than the cost of designing and manufacturing sufficient redundancy into the devices to tolerate defects. In fact, for highly complex electronic and computational devices, there are myriad different strategies, trade-offs, and considerations that need to be optimized in order to devise an effective manufacturing strategy that produces reliable devices at minimum cost.
As the size of features in integrated circuits and other electronic devices continues to decrease into the nanoscale range, the rate at which unavoidable manufacturing defects occur within devices sharply increases. The balances and tradeoffs considered in manufacturing microelectronics devices may not apply to devices that include nanoscale features, including nanowire-crossbar junctions and nanoscale transistors. Therefore, device designers and manufactures, device vendors, and, ultimately, users of devices have all recognized the need for continued research and development in the design and manufacture of nanoscale electronic devices, particularly with regard to cost-effective defect avoidance.